John Denham: May I add to my hon. Friend’s point? The Office for Budget Responsibility’s fiscal responsibility report makes it clear that there are three sets of national accounts: whole Government accounts, national accounts and resource accounts. The comments made by the right hon. Member for Havant (Mr Willetts) apply to only one of the three ways of looking at the national books. My hon. Friend is absolutely right. If we borrow
	£10 billion a year and write off £5 billion a year, that is bound to show up somewhere as a cost to the taxpayer—that is common sense.

Adrian Bailey: I welcome the interventions of two former Ministers, which have shone an economic light on some of the most obscure elements of our education accounting.
	To return to my point on the student loan book, the fact that the sale has now been abandoned underlines what my right hon. Friend said about the non-viability of this course of action in funding future financial higher education commitments.
	In short, we have an education funding model that is producing an ever-increasing call on the nation’s finances, and actually further commitments are being added. The House of Commons Library paper projects that by the mid-2030s the addition to the national debt incurred as a result of this policy will be equivalent to 8%—about £350 billion to £360 billion at current prices. That is a huge sum of money that will have enormous implications for future Governments—and universities and students—in terms of financial planning.

Greg Clark: I am sorry to pre-empt my response to the debate, but at the beginning of his contribution the hon. Gentleman mentioned the important benefit—he referred to it as unambiguous—to the Exchequer. Has he made an estimate of that benefit to set against the costs he is referring to?

Adrian Bailey: I believe that these estimates are projected in the figures from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and certainly there is the netting off, if you like, of these figures. There will be benefits. I said in my opening comments that there would be benefits. However, to have this level of future debt without any policy recognition that it will have to be funded in the future accounts is complacent and, in my view, a dereliction of duty. I shall return to that in one moment.
	It was because of the figures that the Committee recommended an urgent review of the sustainability of the system, and obviously the sort of figures the Minister mentioned would be incorporated in such a review. If the model does stack up, I do not see why the Government should have any problem undertaking that review to demonstrate it. In their reply to the Committee’s recommendation, the Government quoted, of course, Andreas Schleicher from the OECD—I believe this featured in exchanges earlier today:
	“The Government has no current plans to initiate a formal review of the sustainability of the student loans system in England. Indeed the OECD’s Director for Education and Skills, Andreas Schleicher, considers that we are the first European country to have established a sustainable higher education system.”
	However, the Government response did not mention, as the Minister’s earlier response did not, that Andreas Schleicher’s comments were about the pre-2012 funding model, not the current one.